The Principle

by Jérôme Ferrari

  The Schardin to whom these unkind words of Otto Hahn’s are addressed has just given a learned lecture in which he’s put forward the delightful idea that the sudden change of pressure during the explosion of a bomb brings about the immediate, painless deaths of those who are lucky enough to find themselves in its proximity, by causing their internal organs to burst, but his brilliant presentation was interrupted by the air-raid sirens and now, not very eager to seize the unexpected opportunity to validate his conjecture, at the cost, admittedly, of the integrity of internal organs that are particularly dear to him, he’s huddled in the darkness, surrounded by his terrified listeners, struggling against panic, with Otto Hahn making fun of him, while the blast from the tons of bombs being hurled at Berlin this March night in 1943 shakes the walls of the shelter where you think you’ve been buried but from which you will all eventually emerge safe and sound. There will be many more underground burial places from which you will have to emerge, to then walk in a city that’s already no more than a corpse of a city, through a country that’s already no more than a corpse of a country engulfed in the tall red flames of a gigantic funeral pyre, before starting to run at high speed across the pools of phosphorus with, in your heart, a terrible prayer addressed to a God who can no longer be loved but to whom we still turn as if to a cruel and capricious barbarian idol, begging him to let his bombs fall on other people’s children, oh, let other people’s children die and mine live, and when at last you hug them in your arms, you’re ashamed of the selfish, savage joy that takes your breath away, and ashamed of your prayer, but you still have to flee the laboratories and institutes pulverized by bombs, taking with you the heavy water, the rare metals, all the strange things used to feed your experimental atomic reactor, which finally swells, races out of control, and cracks, rumbling like a human heart, before exploding in a jet of molten uranium, leaving you barely time to resume the erratic course that leads you everywhere in Europe, where you give lectures to impassive scientists and watchful spies trying in vain to discover the secret of your soul, while you’ve already been sent back to the sinister monotony of sirens and invisible bombers roaring in the night over the same corpses of cities made indistinguishable by the ravages of destruction, so that you have the troubling sensation of always being in the same place, as if the endless movement that sweeps you along without a respite, to the point that you fear you will never see the end of it, was nothing, when it came down to it, but an exhausting manifestation of motionlessness.

  But there is also another, deeper, more secret movement.

  All it can set up against the monotony of chaos is the calm persistence of its imperceptible deployment, which is perhaps enough to prevent the task of deciding what is the truth from being abandoned solely to the worshippers of death.

  This movement has no bearing at all on the course of events, it doesn’t compensate for any of the horrors, doesn’t save a single life, but as long as it persists, the muffled voices of spiritual homelands haven’t yet been silenced, hope hasn’t been turned once and for all into illusion, nor the truth into poison, and by letting yourself being carried by that movement, every night that you spend writing, you are taken to the sanctuary of a tiny island where no doubt no flower grows, off an isthmus on which, well before you, an old Sufi master was torn between words and silence, a master nobody knows anything about, except for the fact that he too lived in a time of murderers and protected from their rage, so that it could be passed on to the generations, a fragile, precious, living truth, toward which the secret path of metaphor leads. Murderers never discover that path because they don’t understand metaphors, they understand nothing but the repulsive bureaucratic code thanks to which they think they can cast the discreet veil of untruth over the grim slaughter they’ve orchestrated, camouflaging it even from themselves, because the sight of it makes them feel like vomiting. They love death more than anything else, but they can’t bear the stench of the corpses with which they exhaust earth and fire, they wish the dead would have the courtesy to fade into nothingness without leaving any trace of their poor lives, and in order to preserve their delicate stomachs from the deadly poison of truth, they have no other choice than to break the link between words and things through lies, until language, deprived of its vital force, stiffens, becomes gangrened, and itself starts to stink like tiresome carrion left in the sun. But in Munich, a few Christian students hope that the stench won’t have drowned out the healthy smell of shame to the point that any refusal has become impossible: the refusal to accept an ignominious complicity, the refusal to continue being misled by “a second-rate soldier,” author of that “work written in the ugliest German imaginable, which a so-called nation of poets and thinkers has taken for its Bible!” In the name of that minuscule hope, they distribute texts for which they will pay with their lives under the guillotine, without having saved anyone else’s, while somewhere in the night, in Leipzig, in Berlin, you echo those thoughts, writing, “That is why those who still know the white rose or can distinguish the sound of the silvery string must now unite.” Everywhere in your notebook, you trace escape routes full of life that take you far from the murderers and their dead words and free you from the din, returning you to the task that’s always been yours and that of all poets: to go far beyond the resources of language in order to say what can’t be said and to describe as precisely as possible all the orders of a hypothetical, multiple, indescribable reality, which sets a mysterious silvery string resounding, although its faint sound never reaches me—and I know now that I will never write my novel, because I’m incapable of telling a story in a language that doesn’t exist.

  I’m sitting in silence with my father and my cousin on the terrace of the deserted restaurant at two o’clock in the morning. It’s the first week of September. A foreign newspaper, bought by my father, lies on the table, and on the front page there’s a black-and-white photograph of the body of a man lying right in the middle of a street in one of our towns. Bullet holes can be seen in his chest and his head, which seems to have swelled in a strange way. Here, the local newspaper never publishes photographs of dead bodies, especially not during the tourist season. On the radio, a man’s voice, accompanied by an accordion, sings in a language I don’t understand. Listening to him, my father can barely hold back his tears, and my cousin can’t hold his back at all. A few weeks ago, I don’t know why, they shaved their heads, as did all their friends, and the sight of those conspicuously manly faces distorted by emotion strikes me as totally out of place and ridiculous, almost indecent. I look away, and, in order to put an end to the tears and the silence, I ask my cousin what the song says. He wipes his eyes and laboriously translates a few incoherent fragments—What will we find as an excuse? What will we leave to our children? Why do you kill so many hopes? Our griefs and losses, life here is so hard—and other fragments too, all having the same clumsy but sincere grandiloquence. But maybe it isn’t that grandiloquence that makes them cry. Maybe they’re crying simply because, for the first time in years, they’re again hearing clumsy but sincere words. My father asks me if I understand what’s happening here and, when I lie and answer yes, he says that, in that case, I must also understand that I can’t stay, because things have taken such an unpredictable turn he doesn’t know if I’m safe anymore. He’ll take me to the airport tomorrow, I’ll find a life that suits me, somewhere where I’ll really be at home, I mustn’t worry, he won’t let me want for anything, even if something happens to him, and I know that he isn’t just sending me away from his pointless, inglorious war to protect me, but because it isn’t mine.

  I go up to the closet to get my things ready, I wipe the dust off the covers of your books, which I haven’t opened in such a long time, and I find you again, on this night in 1995 when I’m not writing, on that night in 1942 when you write that there is no greater happiness than “the awareness of being at home.”

  In my language, there’s no noun for home and we have to resort to clumsy
periphrases where your language has that wonderful word that you write in your notebook even though you can’t say it, because it’s already been irredeemably poisoned and corrupted, like so many other words. In Poznań, addressing a rapt gathering of SS officers, the Reichsführer takes great delight in spewing out a thick, nauseating concoction in which every word is given a new, arbitrary, unfailingly odious meaning: cold-blooded murders now bear the name duty and we show tact if we refrain from referring to them with our accomplices; behaving in a moral way doesn’t in any way mean, as you write, “being good and helping others,” but not taking anything for ourselves, not even a cigarette, from the bodies of those we’ve just slaughtered; remaining decent means standing before their heaped-up corpses and concealing our nausea beneath an appearance of impassivity, or, better still, actually being impassive; love refers to the irrepressible urge of the death wish and the soul no longer refers to anything at all—a terrible selective sentimentality has taken its place, an almost unlimited faculty for self-pity that doesn’t even risk being seen as paradoxical since, in the language of the Reichsführer, executioner now means victim. Somewhere in Byelorussia, an Einsatzgruppen rifleman, leaning over a pit, is no doubt moved by his own tact as he stands looking down at the young woman he’s taken care to kill first in order to spare her the pain of seeing her child die, while, sitting on their marching kit, some SS officers who’ve just arrived in Treblinka and haven’t yet learned how to remain decent, throw up at the sight of the paths piled high with corpses and complain bitterly of the cruelty of a life that forces them to contemplate such a spectacle; farther south, on the road to the crematoria, Sonderkommando prisoners go about their business watched by Rudolf Höss, who also feels sorry for himself for having to put up so valiantly, even though it wounds his sensitive heart, with the painful proximity of these creatures as devoid of compassion as of the most elementary moral sense—and all of them, without exception, whatever their rank and their place in a Europe they have turned into a charnel house, are victims, who in addition have to endure the ultimate injustice of remaining forever misunderstood.

  But in Paris, Captain Ernst Jünger simply writes in his diary that the Germans have lost the right to complain.

  You have to flee the ruins of Berlin and move your institute to Hechingen, south of Stuttgart, where you continue developing your reactor.

  In the wake of the Allied armies, Colonel Pash and the men of the Alsos Mission search the abandoned laboratories for information on the progress of the German nuclear program and arrest the scientists who’ve been taking part in it.

  In Strasbourg, in the institute directed by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, the Mission’s scientific adviser, Samuel Goudsmit, one of your former Dutch colleagues, long since emigrated to the United States, discovers, no doubt to his immense relief, that you still haven’t even managed to develop a reactor.

  But he also discovers, with a grief infinitely surpassing his relief, that his hopes of finding his parents, who made the fatal mistake of remaining in the Netherlands and of whom he’s had no news since 1943, are in vain. They’re long dead, with no other burial than the smoke from a crematorium chimney.

  Samuel Goudsmit sleeps in houses abandoned by German dignitaries, surrounded by children’s toys and swastika badges.

  He smashes the furniture and the dishes, screaming in remorse and hate.

  On March 16, 1945, your native city is destroyed by incendiary bombs in less than twenty minutes, and in April Colonel Pash arrives in Hechingen. Your colleagues tell him that you’ve already left for Urfeld.

  The movement that has swept you with it for so long at an indeterminate, almost infinite, almost nonexistent speed will soon come to an end as you cycle every night to rejoin your family in Urfeld, but, as you reach out your hands toward that goal that is so close, space seems to expand and distance the Walchensee, Elisabeth, and your children from you, as quickly as you were hurrying toward them, so that you fear you will never see again, and you advance relentlessly along that road that never ends, listening for the menacing noise of planes searching for targets, you hide in thickets, you’re hungry, you pass children scared to death in uniforms that are too big for them, dragging useless rifles, and hordes of unrecognizable ghosts lost in the labyrinth of a defeat so total that your long-ago vision in Leipzig was merely a vague, almost pleasant sketch of it, and yet it seems to you that this defeat is still a victory, perhaps the most complete victory the Nazis have ever won, because they’ve managed to impose their dream of death to such an extent that it will now engulf them and, with them, the nation that followed them, and their own country that the SS are still crisscrossing tirelessly to make sure, before dying, that nobody escapes death, neither those who persist in their futile resistance nor the defeatists and deserters, all the traitors who’ve been so incautious as to hang white flags on the fronts of their houses too early because they wanted to live and whose corpses now sway slowly in the wind around the motionless axis of ropes hanging from the branches of trees, beneath the foliage and the frozen buds, where you would have ended up hanged yourself if the SS officer wearily pointing his gun at you hadn’t agreed, in return for a pack of cigarettes, to let you continue on your way, in the cold, icy spring that triumphant death has turned to winter, until you manage to reach Urfeld, where you still can’t free yourself from the feeling of urgency that oppresses you, as if you were still running at high speed, in spite of the bottle of wine you drink with Elisabeth on the announcement of Hitler’s death, while Magda Goebbels, in a gesture of implacable, dazzling logic, poisons her six children, whose corpses in their immaculate nightdresses, their lips turned blue by the cyanide and their hair adorned with the white ribbons their mother tied on them before summoning them all to her funeral feast, are now lined up in front of the soldiers of the Red Army, who take photographs of them, but you, you listen for the shots that still disturb the threatening silence of your sleepless nights until the blessed moment when Colonel Pash opens the door of your house and tells you he has to arrest you and the movement sweeping you along at last ceases and, even though you know you must again leave your wife, and your children cry and reproach you for never keeping your promise to stay with them, you greet the news with a smile full of gratitude and relief, because by now the war is over, you can rest, you can breathe freely and greet the return of the sun, whose rays make the snow on the mountains glitter, the mountains that plunge into the Walchensee, and you so much want to share with someone your joy at again sensing the presence of beauty that you can’t stop yourself from turning to the American soldier standing beside you, a stranger who’s been walking endlessly in the shadow of death for months, and asking him, as if he’s your guest, in a voice throbbing with hope, a question that’s strange, thoughtless, or simply innocent, I’m not sure which, a question that for some reason I feel is addressed to me.

  Look and tell me, I beg you: what do you think of our lake and our mountains?

  ENERGY

  In May 1945, Samuel Goudsmit, scientific advisor to the Alsos Mission, travels to Heidelberg to meet with Werner Heisenberg, who answers all his questions with an eagerness that’s all the keener in that he doesn’t feel as if he’s undergoing an interrogation but rather that, after six years of inconvenient interruption, he’s resuming a friendly conversation beneath the flowery portals of a spiritual Athens—which, of course, no longer exists. Having magnanimously offered Goudsmit to let his colleagues take advantage of his experience by sharing the results of his research into the development of a nuclear reactor that still doesn’t work, he asks him if anyone in the United States has tackled the same question.

  Impassively, Samuel Goudsmit says: “No.”

  Werner Heisenberg believes him.

  On July 16, 1945, on the eve of the Potsdam Conference, a dome of fire wreathed in a cloud of transparent purple lights up the sky of New Mexico, leaving a crater of glass and broken emeralds in the desert sand. R
obert Oppenheimer, with that tendency toward mysticism more or less shared by all those who’ve been involved with the atom, evokes, in poetic terms that have become all too celebrated, the intoxicating sense of excess that seizes men when they become gods.

  Dragging him away from his meditation on death, time, and the majesty of Vishnu, the man in charge of the Trinity test sums up the situation in a short formula that unfortunately sacrifices mysticism and poetry to a vigorous clarity:

  “Now, Robert, we’re all sons of bitches.”

  On August 6, 1945, for no apparent reason, all communication is cut with Hiroshima.

  No squadron of bombers has been notified.

  A few hours later, a plane sent from Tokyo flies over a heap of smoking ruins stretching as far as the eye can see. In Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer raises his arms in a sign of victory in front of a gathering made hysterical by the announcement of their success. Up until the last minute, he was afraid that something wouldn’t work. He reminded the military top brass for the hundredth time what the optimum climatic conditions were for all the energy available to be used by the explosion, which must occur at the right altitude, neither too high nor too low, but the bomb has surpassed all the hopes placed in it.

  Its rays consumed the flesh of those it touched, it plunged into darkness the awestruck eyes that turned unsuspectingly from a distance toward its magnetic incandescence as if to the friendly light of a star, and it engraved forever on the white skin of the women the dark patterns of their kimonos. The shock wave crossed the city, making bodies vibrate until they broke, tearing apart organs, bringing down buildings that were engulfed in a storm of fire, fanned by the force of unknown winds, while a column of rubble and ashes was sucked up so high into the sky that it soiled the clouds and covered the heads of survivors in heavy drops of black, greasy rain.